FTC

Today's New York Times front page story "Google's computing power betters translation tool" by Miguel Helft spotlights that Google arguably owns and operates "the world's largest computer." The article quotes a Google  engineering VP explaining that Google's unparalleled computing power enables Google to "take approaches others can't even dream of."

Combine the world's largest computer, with the best automated translation capability for most all of the world's top languages, with reports from the front page of the Washington Post that Google proactively sought help from America's top spy agency, the NSA, for its cyber-security vulnerabilities, and it is not surprising that foreigners would be growing increasingly wary of Google and the extraordinary potential power that Google holds over them. 

So what do foreigners increasingly see Google doing?

Will the FTC strictly enforce antitrust laws in its review of Google's AdMob acquisition? Google-Admob is a watershed decision for the FTC given that:

Google announced it was under preliminary investigation by EU Antitrust authorities due to several antitrust complaints filed against it, and it began to frame its antitrust defense against the charges.

• How well do Google's top ten antitrust defenses hold up to scrutiny?  

  1.   "This kind of scrutiny goes with the territory when you are a large company." (Julia Holtz, Google's Senior Competition Counsel, Google Policy Blog post) 

It appears as if privacy is the common casualty of Facebook and Google's competition to outdo each other in forcefeeding a change in society's privacy norms.

The WSJ reported: "Facebook glitch sends email to wrong recipients." 

• If that isn't people's worst email nightmare, what is?  

  This just happens on the day that Google for the first time "has indexed content from the world's largest social network [Facebook] in its real time results" per Digital Beat.

  • Now if you/or Facebook make a mistake with Facebook settings, the world will know it.  

  Newsweek Daniel Lyons got it right in his excellent column this week: "Google's Orwell Moment: On the web, privacy has a price."

Foundem, a UK vertical search competitor to Google, documents serial anticompetitive discrimination on Google's search network, in a data-driven filing to the FCC in the FCC's Open Internet regulation proceeding.

Google's antitrust liabilities continue to grow and proliferate, even if many have not yet connected the dots to recognize this ominous and increasingly obvious pattern facing Google. 

It appears Google Buzz' privacy fiasco has generated a different kind of "buzz" than Google had hoped for.

Kudos to Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity for their spot-on report of quotes from FreePress that exposes what FreePress is really all about.

Their report shows, in FreePress' own words, that they are a dystopian nightmare masquerading as a public interest group protecting freedom of the press.

Google effectively blew off the DOJ's antitrust, copyright and class action objections to the amended Google Book settlement in Google's 77-page brief to the Federal Court adjudicating the settlement. 

In a nutshell, Google argued that its settlement is "remarkably creative" (p 28), and "fair, reasonable and adequate" (p 67). It focused on the settlement's benefit to humanity: "the benefits of approval are bounded only by the limits of human creativity and imagination" (p 2). Google also effectively instructed the Judge to accept its redefinitions of copyright, antitrust, and class action law and to reject the DOJ's interpretation of the law and its "cramped view of the court's jurisdiction" (p 10).    

The core thrust of Google's argument is political. Google essentially asks the court to make a political, not a legal, decision to:

Kudos to Nicholas Carlson of Silicon Valley Insider for an outstanding must-read post on Google's new social media additions to gmail it calls Google Buzz: "WARNING: Google Buzz has a huge privacy flaw."